Like Mother Like Daughter
by Ely Georgieva
Summary: Before he loved Elizabeth, Reddington had been madly in-love with Katerina Rostova. Based on the chapter "She's Dying" from my collection of Lizzington ficlets. One-shot.


I.

"You loved her," Elizabeth stated calmly, looking at the heavenly photograph of her younger self and Katerina Rostova swinging together in happy oblivion. She felt there was no need to pose a question and wait for his roundabout answer. Still, she wanted to have his confirmation; a beheading with a clean, precise cut.

And confirm it, he did. "Yes." A merciful beheading, and a swift one, too. But there was a twisted catch with metaphorical deaths: one doesn't truly perish. And now she had to live with this incurable sickness. Before her, there had been her mother. Katerina had been intimate with Reddington when Elizabeth was a clueless toddler. The man she wanted had fucked her mother more than once. It must've been tremendous, she assumed. She wanted to put an end to this harmful spiral but found herself curious in the most twisted of ways.

There was another catch with metaphorical dying: one could die more than once. She knew she'd be dying every time she thought of Reddington climaxing inside her mother.

"Lizzie, this was a lifetime ago," he offered in an attempt to save her from drowning in the acid that was this predicament. "You… You're something else, in the best way possible."

"I need to process this. I need to find a healthy way to live with this," she explained rationally as she straightened her trench coat.

"Don't leave like this, Lizzie," he implored her. He wanted for the two of them to be wrapped in the secretive cocoon of his secretive apartment. It was no use, though.

"I'll call you tomorrow, Red."

She was going to spend her day dying a thousand metaphorical deaths.

II.

Devastation stabbed her in the gut the moment she woke up. It didn't give her a fair chance at coming back to her senses before it sank its teeth into her insides. Those were the poisonous teeth of the truth. They were injecting her with the painful awareness she wished to erase. There was no erasing it. It was the vicious, brightly colored stamp that was sealing her history with Reddington. Stamps always left terrible marks when peeled off.

III.

Reddington had been intimate with her mother. He'd been in love with her. He'd confirmed it the day before. He'd given her truth that she'd insisted she wanted. It was the twisted prize for her endless perseverance.

None of it could ever be undone. She wondered if he, too, had ever wanted to erase that chapter of his life, now that they were so desperately in love, she and him. She wanted to know if he'd trade his wondrous time with Katerina Rostova for a future with her. Hypothetically, of course. Hypothetical wishful thinking was all that the past would allow.

IV.

" _Lizzie."_ Her name was a sentence of its own. She was listening to the messages in her voicemail. There was only one. It was the result of his call, the one that she'd deliberately missed. " _Please, don't let what has been ruin us, sweetheart. Please. I'm right here. I'll be here. Call me sooner rather than later."_ He'd been pleading from the moment he'd admitted to his past with her mother. It reassured her; cruelly so. A part of her, the twisted one, relished in his willingness to beg her for her love and understanding. That same part of her wanted to punish him for what wasn't truly a sin. She wanted him to pay for having a life before her and he seemed willing to oblige.

V.

"Why are you doing this to yourself, Elizabeth?" he asked her. His eyes were full of love and worry. It made her so angry, her inability to move past his indiscretion that wasn't truly an indiscretion. But she was resolved to die. She was standing at the edge of a hypothetical cliff and was going to take him with her. Only, there was no cliff. There was the safe expanse of yet another living room in yet another safe house; flat floors, accommodating her angry steps, forbidding her to die.

She had asked him about what he'd thought of her three-and-a-half-year-old self when they'd first met.

"Tell me," she commanded.

"You were scared and tiny. You wouldn't let go of your mother. You wouldn't even take my hand. You remained in her lap throughout the entire car ride," he told her. His expression suggested he was taking this journey with her, reliving his existence anew.

Her mother wanted to defect to the States. She wanted an out, but the KGB had been onto her and her precious, young daughter. He was helping them both out, providing them with places to stay. One thing had led to another, he'd concluded, in a visible rush to close that chapter; the whole book that was Katerina Rostova. He was quite the storyteller, she knew. His endless stories could be elaborate, intricate and detailed when he wished to sway her from finding out the truths she was after. It was not the case that day. He didn't want to linger on the painful fragments she knew he remembered well.

"Did you view me as an irritating obstacle? Was I a compromise to you?" Her questioning was merciless; unstoppable. She hoped her poisoned thoughts were hurting him as much as they were hurting her. She wanted them destroyed, both of them.

"Stop." It wasn't a word, associated with begging. But it was exactly what he was doing. His shoulders were so sad, so slumped by the weight of her madness.

"I need to know. I need to know everything there is to know in order to decide if I can move on from this. Please." There; she was begging, too. She was standing in front him, forcing him to look up at her. She was a frightened pit bull, ready to tear flesh and muscles.

"That's what you're telling yourself, Lizzie. But you don't need to know this, any of this," he said, his brows raised in sincerity. Just like that one time he'd told her there was nothing wrong with her. It was a lie then, and it was a lie still. "I've dwelled on the past enough to know that it leads nowhere. Please, sweetheart." He had to try. He'd always try to save her from jumping off the hypothetical cliff.

"Is that why you came back? Because you felt you needed to look after your mistress' child?" She was the kind of pit bull people put down. Because they could never bounce back.

"Yes," he said simply. The pit bull had been put to rest.

"Were you ever going to tell me about any of this?" she asked him as she sat down on the sofa he'd been occupying for the majority of her fierce interrogation.

"No. Not after we'd both developed such feelings for one another." He was giving her nothing but the truth, no sugar-coating at all. She said nothing. Her tears were streaming down her face and she closed her eyes in order to shield herself from the sunlight that seemed to be concentrated on the two of them, her still-blonde hair, and their shared, sorry truth.

"Being in love with a woman who had a child was difficult. It wasn't a love-at-first-sight thing for you and me. You were so stubborn, so adamant to punish me for entering your life. You thought it was my fault, all the running. I guess some things don't change," he told her with a gentle smile on his face. She did nothing to interrupt him, even though her anger grew. She'd been an obstacle once. "I won you over, eventually. Because I wanted to. I wanted to love you. And I did. You'd take naps, curled up on my chest. It was like you were trying to fit your entire, tiny body on my chest," he spoke quietly, fondly. It made her cry harder. "You'd seek me out whenever you had nightmares. I did love you even then, Lizzie, in a way very different from the essence of the feelings I have for you know. And I'll understand if you want to leave me and our twisted past; you can be sure of it," he concluded. His head hung low as all hope escaped him.

She stood up and walked over to the front door of his current apartment. He did nothing to stop her.

VI.

She got her hair done the next day. She was back to her chestnut beginnings, back to her true essence. She was Katerina Rostova's daughter… but it was not _all_ she was. She was an educated woman, a former FBI agent and an American. She was also a woman in love. She owed herself a chance with the man who loved her back.

VII.

"Where are you?" she asked him in a rushed exhale. He'd called her after three days of silence, interrupting her good intentions for a healthy walk.

"I'm flying to Mumbai. On business. I would've taken you with me otherwise," he informed her. He wanted her still. They stood a chance at mending their odd love.

"I want you. But I don't want to punish you," she told him and sat herself down on the nearest bench.

"I'll survive. For you."

Her hopeful tears washed Katerina Rostova away.

The End

Author's Note: Many thanks to my beta, Meaghan M (Juulna).


End file.
